[“As I walked past Banana's room on my way from the communal toilet at the back end of the house, I paused for a moment because it seemed to me that there was an unusual amount of smoke coming from her room. I poked my head in the open door to see what the smoke was, and the first thing I saw was Banana— a transgendered prostitute, or travesti, in her mid-thirties— standing naked in front of a little mirror dangling from a nail on the wall. Banana had just come back from her late-afternoon shower, and she was rubbing Neutrox conditioning fluid into her still-wet hair. “Venha, Don," she called to me when she saw me look in. “Venha sentar aqui." She motioned to the thin mattress on the floor against one of the walls.
Happy to have an excuse not to go back into the room I had just come from, where I had been sitting for over an hour with other travestis watching an insufferably boring novela (soap opera) on television, I entered Banana's tiny room and headed for the mattress. As I passed behind Banana, I realized that the smoke I had wondered about was wafting up from two small cones of incense sitting on the only shelf in the room. “Chama freguês" (Summon customers), Banana informed me without my asking, was the name of the incense. It smelled nice.
My presence in Banana's room immediately prompted the mandatory gesture of hospitality given by any travesti to a guest- she reached to turn on her little six-inch black-and-white television. My protest that I really didn't want to watch television elicited a predictable snort of disbelief from Banana, and with a flick of her wrist, the room was filled with the melodramatic shouts and cries and swollen crescendos of the same tawdry novela that I thought I had just managed to escape. Defeated, I sat down on the mattress, rested my back against the wall, and did my best to ignore the television. Instead, I watched Banana get ready. It was only four o'clock in the afternoon, but Banana was preparing for her evening of work.
The preparations were meticulous. Most attention was paid to the hair, which reached down to below her shoulders and which she had recently dyed black, having tired of her natural mouse-brown color. The black dye made her hair seem thicker, and it drew attention away from her somewhat receding hairline. It was definitely an improvement. But there was still something unsatisfactory about it, Banana seemed to feel. No matter how she parted it and swung it, the hair never seemed to quite satisfy her. She swung it to the right, still wet and dripping with conditioning fluid, only to return to the mirror two minutes later to part it on the left and swing it over in that direction. No, that wouldn't do, either. Over to the right again. Then to the left. I quickly lost track of how many times the hair was reparted, reswung, rearranged.
Eventually, as one of the protagonists of the novela was pressed behind a potted palm overhearing some traumatizing piece of news about her husband, Banana's hair was done, or at least acceptable for the moment, and she lit another cigarette. Still gazing intently into her mirror, she picked up a tweezers and rapidly plucked out a few stray hairs on her upper lip and chin. Satisfied, she now applied a light foundation to her face She then started searching the room for a razor blade, which she needed to sharpen her eyebrow pencil. The places she looked for the razor blade made me wish I hadn't entered her room barefoot, and when she started searching in and underneath the pillow on her mattress, I quickly canceled the thoughts I had been having of perhaps using the pillow to cushion my back against the wall.
After a brief moment of despair, during which Banana voiced her suspicion that another travesti must have stolen her razor blade from her room (“Tá vendo como são as bichas daqui?" You see how these bichas are here?), she found the blade under an onion on the shelf, next to her deodorant.
Eyebrow pencil sharpened, Banana proceeded to draw on her thick, trademark Peking Opera-style eyebrows, which disappeared out into the hair at the sides of her head, and which were emphasized by the red eye shadow that she applied underneath. No other travesti I knew in Salvador made herself up quite so idiosyncratically, and when I once asked Banana why she did so, she replied that it chama atenção, it attracted attention. Much of Banana's prostitution these days was conducted inside a nearby pornographic cinema, and she explained that the dramatic makeup helped to single her out from all the other travestis who roamed the aisles of the cinema asking men if they wanted to “cum" (gozar).
Face on, hair still dripping and rearranged yet again, Banana lit another cigarette, took a swig of the coffee she was drinking out of an old plastic margarine container, and went over to the far corner of her room in search of a pair of panties. She started digging through the mound of crumpled clothes thrown in a pile on a chair, and then she began laughing and throwing them up over her shoulder into the air. “Panties, panties, Ave Maria, not one clean pair of panties, I can't believe it," she hooted. The “Roupinol" (i.e., Rohypnol- a barbiturate that when taken together with alcohol or coffee can become a stimulant) tablet she told me she had taken earlier was clearly kicking in.
Banana finally extracted a pair of lacy black panties from somewhere in the pile of clothes, and she put them on in the characteristic travesti manner of stepping into them and pulling them up to the knees, then squatting with legs apart to hold the panties up. In this position, Banana reached one hand around her back and up between her legs and caught hold of her penis and scrotum. Drawing them backwards, she pressed them flat and held them down against her perineum as she stood upright and pulled up the panties with her other hand. Tugging at her panties from the front and her penis from behind, she shifted her weight back and forth from leg to leg until the panties were on and her penis was firmly and comfortably in place against her perineum. The procedure was complete when Banana smoothed down the panties with both hands, making sure that they presented a tight, flat front. Looking up, Banana noticed that I was peering past the television to watch her. She patted the front of her panties once more. “Minha buceta,” my cunt, she smiled.
Buceta in place, Banana now walked over to her own version of the small altar that many travestis maintain in their room. In most cases, the altar contains a small statue or painting of a Catholic religious figure, such as Jesus or the Virgin Mary, and/or a similar figure of a candomblé saint, such as lemanjá, goddess of the oceans, or lansã, the deity of winds and tempests. In addition to these images, on the altar will be a lit candle and perhaps a glass of water, a small plate of food, and/or a leaf of a plant— all this to bring luck, money, and customers, and to keep away the Olho Grosso (The Evil Eye— literally, the Coarse Eye, or the Big Eye). Unlike most travestis, however, Banana feels herself to be waging a continual battle against the Eye, and she is convinced that other travestis are always trying to drive her to ruin with the help of macumba (black magic) and general bad vibes. Hence, much of Banana’s time (and a not inconsiderable amount of her money) is spent on countermeasures designed to deflect the Eye and keep its power from impairing her ability to work and attract clients. Chief among these countermeasures is the enlistment of the aid of a wide array of saints and candomblé deities. So whereas most travesti altars are sparse, Banana’s is crowded: ceramic figurines of São Jorge killing his dragon, São José leaning on his shepherd’s staff, Nissan Sephora de Fátima holding a large wooden crucifix, the sea goddess lemanjá (two of them), the Virgin and Conceição looking piously up to heaven, the child saints Cosme and Damião— all those jostle for space on the little altar, together with burning votive candles, herbs, small plates of food, and offerings of deodorants and soaps and shampoo (those are for lemanjá, who is, Banana tells me, a mulher muito vaidosa— a very vain woman). When it comes to protection against the Big Eye, Banana makes sure that all her bases are covered.
[Image description: Banana is standing gazing at her altar while wearing a pretty white V-neck top, earrings, and a necklace, with her long beautiful black hair freshly washed and tumbling down her back. Her expression suggests great emotion and her makeup is beautifully done.]
From somewhere near the front of this altar, Banana reached up and took down a wad of newspaper filled with what looked like a pale green powder. She returned to the mirror, dipped her finger into the powder, and gazed into the mirror as she crossed herself on the chest, forehead, and back. She sprinkled some of the powder on her head as well. I asked Banana what the powder was for, and she replied, as I expected she would, with her habitual gesture of pulling down the lower lid of one eye and gazing at me meaningfully for a second: the Olho Grosso.
Thus protected, Banana walked over to the little shelf and took a small squeeze bottle of deodorant, which, working upwards, she sprayed out onto her crotch, anus, stomach, chest, underarms, neck, back, and hair. She then placed her hands above the smoke coming from one of the incense triangles and gathered some of it into her hands. This she directed towards her crotch, stomach, and face. She also lifted up the tiny, somewhat soiled black and green Lycra dress she was planning on wearing and let the smoke from the incense enter that as well. This evening, Banana was clearly taking no chances that customers would pass her by.
Lighting another cigarette and taking an other gulp of coffee (“to strengthen the effect of the Roupinol,” she told me as an aside) Banana now squeezed into her dress. It seemed to me that the effect of the “Roupinol” must already have been pretty strong, because despite a couple of tries, Banana kept getting tangled in the complex braids of shoulder straps that she had to sort out in order to be able to wear the dress. Finally, after two more attempts, with a cigarette and a coffee break in between, the dress was on, and it was smoothed out around her hips and pulled up to near her crotch to her satisfaction. Now all that remained was moisturizing crème on arms and legs, dabs of perfume on crotch, nipples, neck, and hair, and under nostrils (“I want people to smell me coming and going,” she once told me) and another rearrangement of hair. At last, after an extended final posing session in front of the mirror, during which front, back, face, and hair were scrutinized and finally approved, shoes were found somewhere in the pile of clothes, a small pair of sharp nail scissors were slid, with a wink to me, into the front of her panties, and a tiny blue change purse was inserted into the front of her dress.
Banana was ready to go.”]
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